The Guardian has now fired its trainee journalist, Dilpazier Aslam, after news reports picked up the disclosure by Daily Ablution blogger Scott Burgess that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir whose website — according to the BBC — ‘promotes racism and antisemitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people’. The firing is the first (albeit small) British mainstream media scalp taken by the blogosphere, whose vital role in policing and holding to account unaccountable mainstream media has now at last begun to have an effect in Britain and well as in the US.

This has provoked screams of fury from within al Guardian, where some members of staff at least are still clearly in the Aslam camp. An anonymous ‘staff reporter’ writes:

‘Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings. The story is a demonstration of the way the 'blogosphere' can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.’

Ah yes, ‘rightwing’ – the knee-jerk Guardian insult, which it employs as a synonym for ‘evil’, and which it automatically applies to anyone who upholds fundamental notions of truth and the difference between right and wrong. Thus the paper masks the uncomfortable fact that it saw nothing wrong in the views expressed by this member of a party which ‘promotes racism and antisemitic hatred, calls suicide bombers martyrs and urges Muslims to kill Jewish people’ and thought they sat perfectly comfortably on its pages.

Yesterday, the Guardian ran a story about its firing of Aslam, as well as an entry in its Corrections and Clarifications column. But these items obscure the real scandal of this affair. Corrections and Clarifications tells us:

‘At the end of an article headed We rock the boat, page 21 (Comment), July 13, we identified the author Dilpazier Aslam as a Guardian trainee journalist but did not say that he was a member of the political party Hizb ut Tahrir. The Guardian accepts that Mr Aslam’s membership of the party should have been explicitly mentioned...’

What this coy rubric implies but does not spell out is that the Guardian knew that Aslam was a member of Hizb ut Tahrir before the blogosphere got hold of the story. This is confirmed in a brief paragraph buried on yet another Guardian web article on the affair, this time in a ‘background briefing’ published yesterday. After a lot of sanctimonious guff about promoting diversity, this admits that although Aslam did not mention his membership of Hizb ut Tahrir on his application form:

‘Subsequent to joining the Guardian, Aslam made no secret of his membership of this political party, drawing it to the attention of several colleagues and some senior editors.’

And yet

‘On July 12 - the day it was announced that the July 7 London bombs had been placed by young British Muslims from west Yorkshire - Aslam was asked to write a piece for the comment page.’

So Aslam was not fired because the Guardian thought -- as it said in its statement -- that his membership of Hizb ut Tahrir was ‘incompatible with his continued employment by the company’. It had been perfectly happy, it seems, for its trainee to be a member of this organisation – as long as no-one else knew about it. It was only when this fact became known that he was fired – presumably to avoid further embarrassment.

So who were the ‘several colleagues and some senior editors’ who did know and yet chose to do nothing about it? What price the Guardian's anti-fascist credentials, when it is happy to be in bed with an anti-Jewish organisation that promotes religious fascism -- at least until this relationship is exposed? And what does this tell us about the Guardian and the role it is playing at a time of national emergency?